Our Commonwealth is home to numerous exceptional writers. The Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame was created in 2013 by Lexington’s Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning to recognize authors “whose work reflects the character and culture” of Kentucky.
This year, the Hall of Fame committee has selected six writers for induction, bringing the total number of inductees to 39. In this special section, you’ll learn about the lives and legacies of these outstanding Kentuckians.
When Ed McClanahan’s novel The Natural Man was released in 1983, author Wendell Berry said, “Others have observed the natural man in the American condition before, but nobody has done it with such good humor. Ed McClanahan’s good humor both sharpens his eye and gentles his vision. I don’t know where else you would find workmanship that is at once so meticulous and so exuberant.”
Most critics of McClanahan’s work collectively agree on the masterful quality of his work. He is known for his rollicking, good-naturedly crude humor and creatively extensive vocabulary and has been compared with American humorists such as Mark Twain, John Kennedy Toole and S.J. Perelman.
Kentucky native McClanahan was born in Brooksville, the county seat of Bracken County. He is a graduate of Miami (Ohio) University (bacehelor’s degree, 1955) and the University of Kentucky (master’s degree, 1958). He received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 1962 and remained at the university as the E.H. Jones lecturer in creative writing until 1972. While at Stanford, he was nicknamed “Captain Kentucky,” a persona he assumed when he became a member of author Ken Kesey’s infamous band of “Merry Pranksters.” He had various costumes that included a cape (often an American flag), Air Force sunglasses and gold cowboy boots.
McClanahan and contemporaries Berry, James Baker Hall, Bobbie Ann Mason and Gurney Norman are members of the “Fab Five” group of Kentucky writers who are products of the creative writing program at the University of Kentucky. Professors Robert Hazel and Hollis Summers were influential in fostering this group of exceptional writers.
McClanahan’s books include: The Natural Man (a novel), Famous People I Have Known (a comic autobiography), A Congress of Wonders (a collection of three novellas), My Vita, If You Will (a miscellany of fiction, nonfiction, reviews and commentary), Fondelle, or, The Whore with a Heart of Gold: A Report from the Field (a memoir), “A Foreign Correspondence” (an autobiographical story), Spit in the Ocean #7: All About Ken Kesey (a biography/memoir), O The Clear Moment (an “implied” autobiography), and I Just Hitched in From the Coast: The Ed McClanahan Reader (a collection of essays).
The title story of A Congress of Wonders was made into a prize-winning short film in 1993, and the following year, McClanahan was the subject of an hour-long documentary on Kentucky Educational Television. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Esquire, Rolling Stone and Playboy. He twice won Playboy’s best nonfiction award.
Following Kesey’s death in 2001, McClanahan edited Spit in the Ocean # 7: All About Kesey, a collection of stories, poems and essays featuring Kesey. Spit in the Ocean # 7 was the last volume of a literary magazine Kesey had established in 1973 and thereafter sporadically self-published. Each Spit in the Ocean volume featured a different theme and editor. The last Kesey-published edition, Spit in the Ocean #6, had been released more than 20 years before, in 1981.
McClanahan is a master short story writer. In a Publishers Weekly starred review, a reviewer praises O The Clear Moment: “Playful, self-deprecating and wickedly sharp, McClanahan’s nine autobiographical short stories delve into youthful shenanigans and poignant first love in the late 1940s in Bracken [and Mason counties]. McClanahan has an enormously personable style.” Alison Hallett of the Portland Mercury wrote of the book: “McClanahan’s skills as a humorist are predicated on a deep respect for language, and the book’s best moments come when McClanahan indulges in the rhetorical flourishes that make his lowbrow subject matter all the funnier.”
No author has been more passionate about his roots than McClanahan. His work has been set largely in Kentucky, profiling and creating some of the most memorable characters to be found in Kentucky literature. He has spent much of his life promoting the literary arts throughout the United States—as a professor, workshop leader, presenter and reader of his work, and guest speaker at dozens of venues.
McClanahan taught English and creative writing at Oregon State University, Stanford University, the University of Montana, the University of Kentucky and NorthernKentucky University.
Fictionist, essayist, literary critic, editor and filmmaker Gurney Norman is widely recognized as an authority on the literary and cultural history of the Appalachian region. The bulk of his career was spent as director of the University of Kentucky’s Creative Writing Program, fostering student luminaries such as poet Frank X Walker.
Born in Grundy, Virginia, in 1937, Norman was reared in southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky by two sets of grandparents. After his education at the Stuart Robinson Settlement School in Letcher County, he graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1959 with degrees in literature and creative writing. At the university, he befriended fellow writers Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Ed McClanahan and Bobbie Ann Mason. In 1960, after a year of graduate school, Norman received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where he studied with literary critic Malcolm Cowley and Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor.
After two years in the United States Army, Norman returned to eastern Kentucky in 1963 to work as a reporter for The Hazard Herald. Following a three-year stint in journalism, he resigned to concentrate on writing fiction, taking a job with the U.S. Forest Service as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon in the summers of 1966 and ’67.
In 1971, Norman’s novel, Divine Right’s Trip, was famously published in the lower page margins of The Last Whole Earth Catalog and subsequently in book form by the Dial Press (1972) and Bantam Books (1972).
In 1977, his book of short stories, Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories, was published by Gnomon Press and received Berea College’s Weatherford Award. The Louisville Courier-Journal praised the collection upon its release: “Like that of his mentors, Norman’s work is novelistic in scope while preserving in the individual episodes the essential qualities of the short story. This new work can only enhance his reputation by suggesting that Norman may be the outstanding storyteller of his generation.” Norman’s other published works include Book One From Crazy Quilt: A Novel in Progress (1990) and Ancient Creek: A Folktale (2012).
In 1979, Norman joined the English Department faculty at the University of Kentucky. He served as director of the Creative Writing Program until 2014, when Julia Johnson was appointed to replace him and establish an MFA creative writing degree program. Norman continues as a professor in the English Department and serves as a core faculty member in the MFA program.
In the late 1980s, Norman began a collaboration with Kentucky Educational Television to produce three one-hour documentary programs. The documentaries were written and narrated by Norman in association with director John Morgan. Time on the River (1987) is a study of the history and landscape of the Kentucky River valley. In From This Valley (1989), Norman explores the history of the Big Sandy River valley with a focus on its rich literary tradition. Wilderness Road (1991) traces Daniel Boone’s route from the New River near Radford, Virginia, through the Cumberland Gap, to the banks of the Kentucky River in Madison County, Kentucky.
In addition to his television work, Norman collaborated with independent filmmaker Andy Garrison, who directed three films based on Norman’s short stories. Norman’s short story “Fat Monroe” was made into a 1990 film starring Ned Beatty.
Norman is the recipient of numerous awards, including having his work as a fiction writer, filmmaker and cultural advocate honored at the 1996 15th annual Emory and Henry College Literary Festival, which celebrates significant writers in the Appalachian region. He was given the 2002 Eastern Kentucky Leadership Conference Award for outstanding contributions to advancing regional arts and culture and the 2007 Appalachian Studies Association Helen M. Lewis Community Service Award, which recognizes exemplary contributions to Appalachia in service to its people and communities. Norman has served for several years as senior writer-in-residence at Hindman Settlement School’s annual Appalachian Writers Workshop.
Norman was the 2009-2010 Kentucky poet laureate. On May 8, 2011, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Berea College.
In the editor’s note to Alone atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press, Carol M. Booker writes, “It wasn’t the poverty of a washerwoman’s life in rural Kentucky that drove young Alice Allison relentlessly to succeed as a professional. Poverty would be with her most of her life, even as a national reporter for more than one hundred black weekly newspapers. What spurred her on was a keen intellect, immense determination, and a yearning for dignity and respect despite intractable racial barriers.”
Alice Dunnigan lived the quintessential American story of a socially, economically and educationally disadvantaged person who worked her way from extremely humble beginnings to resounding professional success, becoming the first African-American female correspondent at the White House and a credentialed member of the Senate and House of Representatives press galleries.
Her story began in Russellville, where she was born to sharecroppers Willie and Lena Pitman Allison shortly after the turn of the 20th century. Her fate seemed sealed when, at 19, she married a tobacco farmer, but she wanted more and ended the marriage in 1930 to teach public school in Todd County while enrolled in journalism courses at Tennessee A&I State College.
In 1936, Dunnigan became a freelance reporter for the Chicago branch of the American Negro Press (ANP), then served as a reporter for the Chicago Defender in 1946 while taking statistics and economics courses at Howard University. She subsequently became a full-time reporter for the ANP. In 1948, she covered the campaign of President Harry S Truman.
Even at the peak of her career, Dunnigan had to battle racial bias and segregation. She was banned from covering a 1953 speech by President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered in a whites-only auditorium, and when Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft died that same year, she was relegated to sitting with the servants at his funeral.
Dunnigan left the ANP in 1960 to work with Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. She was on LBJ’s staff and continued to serve with him when he became president after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Dunnigan held several other government posts before retiring in 1977.
She authored hundreds of news articles, columns and ANP wire publications. Her reporting appeared in prominent newspapers such as The Chicago Defender, The Florida Star, Houston Forward Times, St. Louis Sentinel, Pittsburgh Courier, The Washington Sun, The Cincinnati Herald, The Sacramento Observer and dozens of others. Dunnigan’s book The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Tradition, a collection of fact sheets about black Kentuckians compiled for her students in Russellville, was published in 1982. Her autobiography, A Black Woman’s Experience: From Schoolhouse to White House, appeared in 1974 and was reprinted in a condensed version, Alone atop the Hill, in 2015.
Dunnigan died May 6, 1983, in Washington, D.C. She was honored in September 2018 by the installation of a statue of her at the Newseum there. A favorite story was told at the dedication ceremony by USA Today reporter Patty Rhule in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered. Rhule said that when Dunnigan asked her supervisor at ANP for permission to cover Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign, her boss said yes, but that ANP wouldn’t fund it. She raised her own money to take the trip, supplemented by fruit and snacks left behind at campaign rallies.
The bronze statue, sculpted by Arden Barnes, was displayed from September-December 2018 at the Newseum and was then moved for permanent display in the town square of her hometown of Russellville.
When professor, poet and scholar Jane Gentry Vance passed away in 2014, Jeff Clymer, chair of the English Department at the University of Kentucky, said, “Jane wrote with insight and grace of family, of the intricacies of our emotions, and of the ironies of everyday life. Her moving and elliptical poetry gave us new ways to think about life’s complexities, often with a dash of ironic humor.”
Vance was born on a farm near Athens in Fayette County, where her ancestors in the Gentry and Bush families had lived since the time of the settlement at Boonesborough in 1775. She earned degrees in English literature from Hollins College (bachelor’s degree, Phi Beta Kappa), Brandeis University (master’s degree) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (doctorate). She joined the University of Kentucky in 1972 and became a well-respected poet and professor for more than 40 years as a faculty member in the graduate school of the English Department, where she conducted poetry-writing workshops and taught courses on the history of ideas in the department and the university’s honors program.
Vance published three collections of poetry during her lifetime. A Garden in Kentucky (1995) and Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig (2006) were both published by the Louisiana State University Press. In 2005, Press 817 in Lexington published her chapbook, A Year in Kentucky. Her New and Collected Poems of Jane Gentry, edited by Julia Johnson, was released posthumously in 2017. She also self-published a short volume of local history, Looking Back at Athens (1986), with William M. Lamb.
Her poems appeared widely in journals, including The Sewanee Review, The Hollins Critic, Harvard Magazine, New Virginia Review, Southern Poetry Review and The American Voice. As a literary critic, she published numerous reviews, interviews and essays. Of particular interest are her essays in The Southern Literary Journal, Mississippi Quarterly and Iron Mountain Review about Mary Lee Settle, a West Virginia writer who won the 1978 National Book Award for her novel, Blood Tie.
Vance was awarded two Al Smith Fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council and held fellowships at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, and at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Lynchburg. After having been nominated by her honors program students, Vance won the UK Alumni Association’s 1986 Great Teacher Award. Her awards also include the Hollins University Distinguished Alumnae Award (2013) and induction into the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame (2013).
From 2007-2008, Vance served as Kentucky’s poet laureate, traveling the state advocating for the importance of literature in the culture and history of Kentucky. In 2008, she organized and participated in a reading of Kentucky poetry at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and in 2009 presented an original poem honoring the bicentennial of President Abraham Lincoln’s birth at the John F. Kennedy Center in the nation’s capital.
Poet Nikky Finney, who served on the university faculty with Vance, said of her colleague, “One of the great blessings of my career at the University of Kentucky was Jane Gentry Vance. Jane often taught the introductory poetry course, Imaginative Writing Poetry 207.
“The students in Jane’s class, who went on to 407 and 507, the courses I often taught, had been guided and drilled by a master teacher in the fine art of how to make a poem, and what to love about the making, and how to truly work at being a poet. It was as if Jane did all the hard chiseling work and then handed them over for their polishing. The foundation they received from Jane gave them gigantanormous wings.”
Upon the death of famed mystery writer Sue Grafton in 2017, the online site Literary Hub commented on the legacy of her 40-year writing career: “The familiar sight of one of Grafton’s alphabet novels has served as a reliable sign—whether a hardcover on the shelf or a well-traveled paperback poking out of an overnight bag—that somewhere nearby was a reader. And not just any reader, nor the kind who puts out books for show or piles them on the nightstand with good intentions, but an honest to God, dyed in the wool reader, someone who wears pages ragged then reaches for more, a middle-of-the-night joneser with a vast appetite for the art of character, words come to life, and, most of all, suspense.”
Grafton was born in Louisville, the daughter of C.W. Grafton, a mystery-writing attorney who stayed late at work to turn out his three novels, and Vivian Harnsberger, a high school chemistry teacher. She grew up in the same neighborhood as “gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson and was a few years behind him at Atherton High School. She attended the University of Louisville (bachelor’s degree, 1961) and completed some graduate work in literary analysis at the University of Cincinnati.
She wrote two mainstream novels in the 1960s—Keziah Dane (1967) and The Lolly-Madonna War (1969)—and adapted the latter into a film for MGM in 1973. She wrote three other screenplays and teleplays in the 1970s, including for Rhoda in 1975, before writing her first mystery, A Is for Alibi, in 1982.
Grafton said that while reading Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabetical picture book of children who die by various means, she had the idea to write an alphabetically titled series of novels. She immediately sat down and made a list of all of the crime-related words she knew. The central character, private investigator Kinsey Millhone, appears from the beginning of her murder mystery alphabet series.
By 1998, Millhone had been featured in 14 novels, through N Is for Noose. The books featuring Millhone have collected a wide readership and have been translated into Dutch, Russian, Polish, Spanish and French. When Grafton’s novels were late to press in the early 1990s, readers called bookstores to complain.
Grafton’s detective is a traditional heroine: a loner with a code, who works for just causes. Ed Weiner in The New York Times Book Review writes, “She plays it fairly safe and conventional.” She is sometimes contrasted with Robert B. Parker for the lack of violence in her novels.
Grafton insightfully questions gender roles and explores social issues in her work. For example, in T Is for Trespass (2007), she alternates points of view between Millhone and the culprit, Solana Rojas, a “chameleon” who assumes the identities of others in order to steal from them.
Grafton’s alphabet mystery novels include: A Is for Alibi, (1982), B Is for Burglar (1985), C Is for Corpse (1986), D Is for Deadbeat (1987), E Is for Evidence (1988), F Is for Fugitive (1989), G Is for Gumshoe (1990), H Is for Homicide (1991), I Is for Innocent (1992), J Is for Judgment (1993), K Is for Killer (1994), L Is for Lawless (1995), M Is for Malice (1996), N Is for Noose (1998), O Is for Outlaw (1999), P Is for Peril (2001), Q Is for Quarry (2002), R Is for Ricochet (2004), S Is for Silence (2005), T Is for Trespass (2007), U Is for Undertow (2009), V Is for Vengeance (2011), W Is for Wasted (2013), Kinsey and Me: Stories (2013), X (2015) and Y Is for Yesterday (2017).
Several of Grafton’s novels have won awards, the majority of which have been for F Is for Fugitive (1989) and G Is for Gumshoe (1990). A number of them, such as L Is for Lawless (1995) and M Is for Malice (1996), have been praised for their pace and humor. B Is for Burglar (1985) is regarded by some readers as her best and won Grafton an Edgar Award, which honors mystery writers.
Grafton died Dec. 28, 2017. She is survived by her husband, Steven Humphrey, daughters Jamie Clark and Leslie Twine, and son Jay Schmidt.
One of the most influential native Kentucky journalists was born Helen Amelia Thomas, the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, in Winchester on Aug. 4, 1920. Her grocer father and homemaker mother had nine children. They relocated to Detroit in 1924. Several sources report that by the time she entered high school, Thomas knew she wanted to become a journalist. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1942. After college, she became a “copy girl” at the Washington Daily News and was quickly promoted to reporter. In 1943, she joined the United Press (UP) and covered local news and stories about women.
In the early 1950s, Thomas began covering Washington celebrities and government agencies. She continued with the UP in 1958 when it merged with the International News Service and became United Press International (UPI), working there until 1974.
In 1960, she became the first female member of the White House press corps when she began covering President-elect John F. Kennedy and White House daily press briefings and press conferences. In 1962, she was credited with influencing Kennedy to allow women to attend annual dinners for White House correspondents and photographers.
Two years after the election of President Richard Nixon in 1968, Thomas was named UPI’s chief White House correspondent, the first female to achieve that position. Additionally, she was the only female print journalist to accompany Nixon during his historic 1972 trip to China.
As her career progressed, Thomas continued to remove barriers for female journalists. In 1974, she became the first woman to head UPI’s White House Bureau. The following year, she became the first woman to be admitted to the Gridiron Club, the historic Washington press group, which later named her its president. Additionally, Thomas also was the first female president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, serving from 1975-1976.
Thomas became a fixture in the White House press corps, with a seat in the White House briefing room. Often called the “First Lady of the Press,” she covered 10 presidents over five decades and became well known to the American public for her hard-hitting questions. She resigned from UPI in 2000, after the news organization was acquired by New World Communications. Two months after her resignation from UPI, Thomas was hired by the Hearst Corporation as a columnist.
Thomas received numerous awards and more than 30 honorary degrees. Among the most notable are: World Almanac’s 25 Most Influential Women in America (1976), the William Allen White Foundation Award for Journalistic Merit from the University of Kansas (1986) and the Al Neuharth Award for Excellence in the Media from the Freedom Forum in 1991. The White House Correspondents’ Association honored her in 1998 by establishing the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award.
Thomas published six books between 1975 and 2009. Her topics were autobiography, political humor, political commentary and one children’s book, The Great White House Breakout (2008).
Thomas’ career ended in controversy in 2010 when a YouTube video surfaced in which she said that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return home to “Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else.” She issued an apology about her remarks saying, “They do not reflect my heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.” Thomas retired a week later, but in July 2011, she returned to write a column for the Falls Church News-Press in Virginia.
This venerable White House reporter once said of the office of president of the United States: “I respect the office of the presidency, but I never worship at the shrines of our public servants … The Washington press corps has the privilege of asking the president of the United States what he is doing and why.” Statements like this defined her as a consummate journalist—one who pursued truth and accuracy in writing her reports.
Thomas died on July 20, 2013, at age 92.
Biographies by James B. Goode
Photos by Guy Mendes and/or courtesy of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning